Wesleyan University

Nazism as a Secular Religion

Author(s): Milan Babk
Reviewed work(s):
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Oct., 2006), pp. 375-396
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
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History
and
Theory
45
(October 2006),
375-396
?
Wesleyan University
2006 ISSN: 0018-2656
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION'
MILAN BABIK
ABSTRACT
This article examines the
implications
of Richard
Steigmann-Gall's
recent revisionist
representation
of Nazism as a Christian
(Protestant)
movement for the
increasingly
fashionable accounts of Nazism as a secular or
political religion. Contrary
to
Steigmann-
Gall's contention that Protestant Nazism undermines these
accounts,
I
suggest
that his
portrayal
of Nazism as a variant of Protestant millennialism is not
necessarily
inconsistent
with the secular
religion approach.
A closer look at the so-called
L6with-Blumenberg
debate on secularization indeed reveals that
modem
utopianisms containing
elements of
Protestant millennialism are the best candidates for the label of secularized
eschatology.
That
Steigmann-Gall
has reached
exactly
the
opposite
conclusion is
primarily
because his
conceptual understanding
of secular
religion
is uninformed
by
the secularization debate.
Insofar as
Steigmann-Gall
extracts his model of secular
religion
from
contemporary politi-
cal
religion historiography
on
Nazism,
this article
points
to a
larger problem:
a
disjunction
between historians
utilizing
the
concept,
on the one
hand,
and
philosophers
and social
theorists who have
shaped it,
on the other.
I. INTRODUCTION
In 2003 the historian Richard
Steigmann-Gall published
a book in which he
took
up
the
neglected subject
of the Nazis'
religious
beliefs and
challenged
the
conventional wisdom that Nazism was either non-Christian or anti-Christian.2
In
sharp
contrast to this view of Nazi ideas and
practice, Steigmann-Gall
drew
attention to the
stunning degree
to which
Christianity,
and more
specifically
Protestantism,
was central to Nazi
self-understanding. According
to
him,
many
top
Nazis
comprehended
their actions and movement in Christian
terms,
as a
mission
completing
the work of the Reformation in
Germany.
In a
follow-up
article
published
one
year later,
Steigmann-Gall
used his revision of Nazi
religious
views as a
springboard
for an
important
claim: he
rejected
the
increasingly popular
interpretation
of Nazism as a secular or
political religion.3
It was not
possible
to
1.
I
would like to
express my
thanks to
Christopher
Coker
(LSE)
for his tireless
mentorship;
to
Jennifer Welsh
(Oxford)
for
keeping
the excesses of
my graduate
work in
check;
to the librarians
at
Colby College (Waterville, Maine)
for
fetching
all the
books;
to the Dulverton Trust at Oxford
University
for the
generous
D.Phil.
fellowship;
and
finally
to the
journal's anonymous
referees for
their
highly
useful comments. Whatever
mistakes, omissions,
and
misinterpretations
remain are
entirely my
own.
2. Richard
Steigmann-Gall,
The
Holy
Reich: Nazi
Conceptions of Christianity,
1919-1945
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
3. Richard Steigmann-Gall, "Nazism and the Revival of Political Religion Theory," Totalitarian
Movements and Political
Religions (hereafter TMPR) 5, no. 3 (2004), 376-396.
376 MILAN BABIK
describe Nazism as a secular
religion precisely
because its
ideological
content
was no modem
irreligious
ersatz for
Christianity,
but traditional
Christianity
itself,
albeit
highly
unorthodox and with a
strong
racialist bent. Is
Steigmann-
Gall's
understanding
of the
implications
of his
portrayal
of Nazism correct? Is his
rejection
of the secularization thesis valid? Does his
representation
of Nazism as
a Protestant movement
necessarily
undermine the
interpretation
of Nazism as a
secular
religion?
In the
following
article I
suggest
that while
Steigmann-Gall's
revision of Nazi
conceptions
of
Christianity represents
a welcome addition to accounts of Nazism
as a form of
neo-paganism,
his claim
concerning
the
implications
of this revision
for the
interpretation
of Nazism as a secular
religion
is
deeply problematic.
His
dismissal of the secular
religion approach
stands on an
untenably
narrow
conception
of secularization as a tool of historical
understanding.
In other
words,
I take issue
not with
Steigmann-Gall's depiction
of Nazism as a Protestant
movement,
but
with the model of secular
religion against
which he
subsequently
evaluates it. This
model
ignores
the finer
points
of secularization
theory;
it
represents only
a truncated
version of the much more
rigorous
model of secularization
developed
in the debate
between Karl
Liwith
and Hans
Blumenberg, respectively
the main
proponent
and
the main critic of the secularization thesis in the area of historical
theory.
The model
presupposed by Steigmann-Gall
defines secular
religion
in
strictly
functionalist terms: as an
irreligious surrogate
for
Christianity.
In this functionalist
perspective,
a movement
qualifies
as a secular
religion
if its ideational content is
non-Christian or
anti-Christian;
its link to
Christianity
consists
solely
in
serving
the same function as
Christianity:
the act of
hoping
and
believing. Although
this
model of secular
religion
as a functional substitute for traditional
eschatology
is
valid,
it is not
complete.
A careful
reading
of the
L6with-Blumenberg
debate on
secularization indicates that the
bridge
between traditional and secular
religion
may
extend
beyond
function to content.
Indeed,
where the movement or
ideology
in
question (in
this case
Nazism) displays continuity
of content and
consciously
advances Christian
ideas,
its status as secularized
eschatology
tends to be even
better-founded than in the case of
only
functional
continuity.
In
light
of the
L6with-Blumenberg debate,
Steigmann-Gall's
revision of Nazism
as a Protestant movement thus does not undermine the
interpretation
of Nazism
as a secular
religion,
but tends to make this
interpretation
more
plausible.
This
result
may
seem
counterintuitive,
for how could Nazism be Christian and secular
at the same time? The
key
to this
apparent puzzle
lies in
recognizing
that in the
context of secularization
theory
the term
"secularization" does not
necessarily
signify
de-Christianization,
but
primarily
the
process
of
orienting
transcendent
(Augustinian) eschatology
to this world
(ad sceculum): investing
the
allegorical
categories
of the biblical
story
of salvation with
temporal,
historical
significance.
Protestant millennialism, originating
in the
theological
historism of medieval
mystics
such as Joachim of Floris, secularizes
Augustinian eschatology
while
remaining consciously
and
openly
Christian.
I
begin
with a brief overview and evaluation of
Steigmann-Gall's pathbreaking
study,
The
Holy Reich, and the
subsequent
article in which he used the thesis
advanced in this book to
reject
the
interpretation
of Nazism as a secular
religion.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
377
While
discussing
his
challenge
to the secularization
thesis,
I
pay special
attention
to
explicating
the model of secularization
presupposed
in his
critique
in order to
demonstrate that he
comprehends
secularization in
strictly
functionalist terms. The
next section focuses on secularization
theory
and
represents
the main
part
of the
paper.
Its
purpose
is to
present
L6with's secularization thesis and
Blumenberg's
criticism of
it,
to evaluate the
debate,
and to achieve a nuanced
grasp
of
secularization as a theoretical model
illuminating
the transition from Christian
eschatology
to the modem idea of
progress.
It will be seen that
Blumenberg's
yardstick
for
evaluating
modem
progressivism
as secularized extensions of
Christian
providentialism
centers
precisely
on the issue of
continuity
of ideational
content: a
particular
instance of the
modem
metanarrative of
progress (such
as the
Nazi idea of
progress
to the Third
Reich) may
be deemed secularized
eschatology
only
if it
possesses
the same substance of ideas as traditional Christian
eschatology.
Functional
continuity,
or what
Blumenberg
terms "functional
reoccupation,"
is
insufficient
by
itself. The conclusion of the
essay interprets Steigmann-Gall's
Protestant Nazism in
light
of the
Lbwith-Blumenberg
debate on secularization.
By demonstrating
that Nazism had Christian
content,
Steigmann-Gall
has
unwittingly
met the test of secular
religion proposed by
secularization
theory's
most
rigorous
critic. If
Steigmann-Gall
reaches the
opposite
conclusion and sees
Protestant Nazism as
running
counter to the secular
religion approach,
this is
because he lacks more
thorough
awareness of secularization
theory.
Insofar as he
extracts his
understanding
of secularization from
contemporary political religion
historiography
on
Nazism,
the lack of awareness is more extensive. Secular
religion historiography
would
profit
from
becoming
more theoretical.
II. PROTESTANT NAZISM AS RELIGIOUS POLITICS RATHER THAN
POLITICAL
(SECULAR)
RELIGION
Since the
early
1990s,
historians of interwar
Europe
have
increasingly
turned
to
political religion theory
in an effort to understand better the
legitimacy
of Italian
Fascism,
German
Nazism,
and Soviet
Bolshevism.4
Much of this recent
scholarship
rests on two broad
background assumptions:
that a
sense-making
crisis occurred
in
Europe following
the Nietzschean
"Death
of God" that was accelerated
by
the Great
War,
and that totalitarian movements
successfully garnered loyalty
and
support by erecting
new
surrogate
deities. As Emilio Gentile has written in
a
widely
cited article
laying
out the semantic and
conceptual
framework for the
study
of totalitarianism
through
the
optic
of
political religion: "Precisely
because
it ... has
swept away age-old
collective beliefs and
institutions,
modernity
has
4. Main texts include Emilio Gentile, "The Sacralization of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations
and Reflections on the Question of Secular
Religion
and Totalitarianism," transl. Robert Mallett,
TMPR 1, no. 1 (2000), 18-55; Gentile, The Sacralization of
Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996); Totalitarismus
und
Politische
Religionen: Konzepte
des
Diktaturvergleichs,
ed. Hans Maier and Michael
Schhifer,
3 vols.
(Paderborn: Sch6ningh, 1996, 1997,
2003); Philippe Burrin, "Political
Religion:
The Relevance of a
Concept," History and Memory
9, no. 1 (1997), 321-349; Roger Griffin, "The Palingenetic
Political
Community: Rethinking
the
Legitimation
of Totalitarian
Regimes
in Inter-War
Europe,"
TMPR 3, no. 3 (2002), 24-43; and
Michael
Burleigh,
"National Socialism as a Political
Religion,"
TMPR 1, no. 2 (2000), 1-26.
378 MILAN BABiK
created crisis and
disorientation--situations
which
have,
in
turn,
led to the re-
emergence
of the
religious question,
even if this has led the individual to turn
not to traditional
religion,
but to look to new
religions
that sacralize the
human."5
Often non-Christian or anti-Christian in their
ideological
content,
totalitarian
movements nonetheless furnished new
objects
of
worship by elevating worldly,
political
entities
(state, nation, race, class)
to the level
formerly occupied by
the transcendent idols of
Christianity.
In the
sphere
of historical
consciousness,
Christian
eschatology
was
replaced
with secular salvationism
or,
in
Roger
Griffin's
terminology, "palingenesis":
the idea of
history
as
revolutionary progress
to
utopian society
founded on a
new,
revitalized
type
of human
being.6
Where
religious
faith once led the Christian believer to
imagine history
as a
process
guided by
divine
providence
to the
Kingdom
of
God,
reason now enabled modern
Germans or Russians to view
history
as a
process propelled by
the scientific law of
race or class to the
racially pure
Third Reich or the classless Third International.
Among English-speaking
historians of Nazi
Germany, probably
the main
proponent
of the
political religion approach
has been Michael
Burleigh,
whose Third
Reich: A New
History opens
with the contention that "theories of totalitarianism
have
rarely
been
incompatible
with theories of
political religion;"7
he
subsequently
utilizes the latter
interpretive
lens as a vital
complement
to the much more common
former one.
Burleigh's writings conveniently
illustrate the
meaning
of
political
or
secular
religion
in recent
historiography
on Nazism. Political
religion
is
sharply
distinguished
from authentic Christian
religion, which,
as
Burleigh emphasizes,
Nazism
diligently
"bashed over the head" with
science.8
Hitler's words at the
Party Congress
Grossdeutschland in
Nuremberg
in 1938
provide Burleigh
with a
good
demonstration of this
point:
"National
Socialism,"
the
Fiihrer
insisted,
"is a
cool and
highly
reasoned
approach
to
reality
based
upon
the
greatest
of scientific
knowledge
and its
spiritual expression."'
The essence of Nazi
religiosity
thus lies
for
Burleigh
in the
ideology's hypertrophied rationality
and scientism: the belief
that the
Rassenprinzip
is the
meaning
of
history,
the conviction that race science is
the
pathway
to the millennial
Reich,
and the various rituals of national consecration
based on these
suppositions.'0
In this
vein,
Nazism was neither
genuine
science nor
genuine Christianity,
but a
grotesque parody
of both.
Burleigh
has no doubt that its
sanctification of the Volk on the basis of blood must have induced "nausea in
any
fastidious rationalist or
person
of
genuine religious
faith.""
5.
Gentile,
"Sacralization of
Politics,"
30-31.
6.
Griffin, "Palingenetic
Political
Community,"
30.
Palingenesis
is an
integral
element of Gentile's
interpretation
of totalitarianism and secular
religion
as well. See
Gentile, "Sacralization of
Politics,"
19,
and his
subsequent
defense of the
interpretation
in
Gentile, "Fascism,
Totalitarianism and Political
Religion:
Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticism of an
Interpretation,"
transl. Natalia
Belozentseva, TMPR 5, no. 3 (2004), 326-375.
7. Michael
Burleigh,
The Third Reich: A New
History (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2000), 18.
8. Ibid., 254.
9. Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945: The Chronicle of
a
Dictatoriship,
ed. Max
Domarus, transl. Chris Wilcox and
Mary
Fran Gilbert, 4 vols. (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990-), II, 1146,
speech
dated
September 6, 1938, quoted
in
Burleigh,
Third Reich, 253.
10. For an extensive discussion of scientism as the
religion
of totalitarianism, see Tzvetan
Todorov, "Totalitarianism: Between
Religion
and Science," transl.
Brady Brower and Max Likin,
TMPR 2, no. 1 (2001), 28-42.
11. Burleigh,
Third Reich, 264.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
379
Yet this
vilkisch
religion,
too
dogmatic
to
pass
for
genuine
science and too
blasphemous
to
pass
for
genuine religion,
was
precisely
what
appealed
to the
gray
masses of
everyday
Germans conscious of the "Death of God" and
yearning
for
something
else to take the
place
of His
Kingdom
as the
meaning
of existence.
Burleigh captures
this
psychological dynamic by quoting
time and
again
the
French Romantic nationalist Michelet: "It is from
you
that I shall ask for
help, my
noble
country, you
must take the
place
of the God who
escapes
us,
that
you may
fill within us the immeasurable
abyss
which extinct
Christianity
has left
there."'2
The Nazi masterminds
recognized
this vast
spiritual abyss
and
quickly
filled it
with
surrogate
ideals. Their success in
securing popular
and intellectual
support
frequently extending
to self-sacrifice resulted from their
ability
to
wrap
their
secular
vilkisch
ideology
in
religious
forms and
rituals,
that
is,
from their
ability
to sacralize the
Volk.'3
Burleigh's
model of secular
religion broadly converges
with
Gentile's. Both echo
George
Mosse's earlier thesis that "For the National Socialist
[the]
basic
[Christian]
form could not be
abandoned,
but should
simply
be filled
with a different
content,"'4
or Fritz Stem's claim that Nazism was a Germanic
religion
"which hid beneath
pious
allusions to ... the Bible a most
thoroughgoing
secularization. The
religious
tone
remained,
even after the
religious
faith and the
religious
canons had
disappeared."'"
Against
all such
portrayals
of Nazism as either
anti-Christian, non-Christian,
or
Christian
only cynically,
on the surface and for other ulterior
motives,
Steigmann-
Gall has
recently lodged
a
powerful objection.
"For
many
of its
leaders,"
he
suggested
on the basis of his extensive doctoral
research,
"Nazism was not the result
of a 'Death of God' in secularized
society,
but rather a radicalized and
singularly
horrific
attempt
to
preserve
God
against
secularized
society."'6
Whereas
Burleigh,
Gentile,
and other
exponents
of Nazism as a secular
religion postulate
that Nazism
acknowledged
the abdication of
Christianity
as irreversible and countered the
consequent spiritual
disenchantment with alternative
idols,
Steigmann-Gall
insists
that Nazism was a
genuinely
Christian reaction.
Christianity, according
to
him,
did not constitute a barrier to Nazism.
Quite
the
opposite:
For
many [top Nazis],
the battles
waged against Germany's
enemies constituted a war in the name of
Christianity.... [They]
believed
they
were
defending good by waging
war
against evil,
fighting
for God
against
Devil,
for German
against
Jew.
They
were convinced that their movement did not mean the
death of
God,
but the
preservation
of God."
With
respect
to the Nazi
conception
of
history,
the narrative of
progress
to the
Third Reich was not
merely generic utopianism,
related to biblical
eschatology
solely
on the basis of structural
identity.
The
identity
extended
beyond
form to
12.
Quoted
in
Burleigh,
"National Socialism as a Political
Religion,"
TMPR
1,
no. 2
(2000),
6, and
again
in
Burleigh,
"Political
Religion
and Social Evil (The Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial
Lectures)," TMPR 3, no. 2 (2002), 5.
13. In
Burleigh's words, "fundamental tenets [of Christianity]
were
stripped out, but the
remaining
diffuse
religious emotionality
had its uses" (Third Reich, 256).
14.
George
L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York:
Fertig, 1975), 80.
15. Fritz Stern, The Politics
of Cultural
Despair:
A
Study
in the Rise
of
the Germanic
Ideology
(Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974), xxv.
16.
Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 12.
17. Ibid., 261.
380 MILAN BABiK
content,
which is to
say
that Nazi
utopianism
was conscious Christian
utopianism.
Rather than a new wine
poured
into old
bottles,
apostasy custom-designed
to fit the
mold of vacated
eschatological
idioms,
for
Steigmann-Gall
the Third Reich was
the old wine itself: the
Christian,
and more
specifically
Protestant,
millennium. Far
from
representing
a substitute for the
Kingdom
of
God,
the Reich was
imagined
by many top
Nazis as the
Holy
Reich-the title of
Steigmann-Gall's
book.
Steigmann-Gall's
revision of Nazi views of
Christianity emphasizes especially
the notion of
"positive Christianity," adopted
under Point 24 of the NSDAP
Party
Program (1920)
as the official
standpoint
of the
party.
This was not
merely
a
political ploy
and an ad hoc concoction of ideas aimed at
securing votes,
but a
religious system possessing
an inner
logic
and
reflecting
the sincere convictions
of its
proponents.18
Summarized
by Steigmann-Gall
as "a
syncretic
mix of the
social and the economic tenets of confessional Lutheranism and the doctrine
and
ecclesiology
of liberal
Protestantism,"19
positive Christianity encapsulated
a nationalist and racist
theology
that
appropriated
Jesus as the
original Aryan
socialist and
anti-Semite,
proposed
to
bridge
the
long-standing
confessional
divide in
Germany
in favor of a
single
Reich
Church,
and tended to define itself
in
opposition
to
"negative Christianity": Christianity
as it
actually
materialized in
history, hijacked by
Satan
dwelling
in
Jerusalem, Rome,
and
finally,
in the Marxist
disguise,
in Moscow as well. If the
positive
Christians within the NSDAP
rejected
Christianity,
then it was
only
the historical
kind,
and
only
in order to excavate
from underneath its edifice the authentic and
uncorrupted Christianity:
their own.
These
Nazis,
writes
Steigmann-Gall,
"staked a discursive claim to
represent
the 'true'
political
manifestation of
Christianity. They
all held that
Christianity
was a central
aspect
of their
movement,
shaped
its
direction,
or in some cases
even
helped explain
Nazism."20 If historians are to remain faithful to the Nazi
worldview,
the Nazi
struggle against
the
Jews, Marxism,
and liberalism must be
represented
as a
religious struggle,
a mission to
complete
the Reformation.
Steigmann-Gall clearly recognizes
that not all Nazis were
positive
Christians
and that the NSDAP contained a second
principal
current of
religious thought:
paganism, spearheaded by
Alfred
Rosenberg
and
including
other notable
figures
such as
Himmler.
In this case the
attempt
at
supplanting Christianity
with an
ersatz
religion, marking
a return to
pre-Christian
Nordic
myths
such as
Wotan,
was undeniable. Unlike
positive
Christians,
who saw the Protestant
clergy
as a
vital
ally
if
only
it would reform itself in
compliance
with a Nazi
ideology
that
embodied the true
message
of Christ and
Luther,
for
paganists
even the established
Protestantism was too "Romanized" and hence had to be abandoned.21 Yet in
proposing
a new
vdlkisch
religion
to
replace
it,
not even the
paganists dispensed
with Protestantism in
toto,
according
to
Steigmann-Gall.
As he
writes,
"Rosenberg
in
particular,
convinced that he had
successfully
outlined a new
religious
belief
system, salvaged many
dimensions of the Christian worldview for his new, un-
Christian faith."22 That the
paganists frequently displayed
fierce anticlericalism
18. Ibid., 14, 49, 262.
19. Ibid., 262-263.
20. Ibid., 49.
21. Ibid., 112.
22. Ibid., 262.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
381
did not
prevent
them from
venerating
Jesus as the
archetypal Aryan
anti-Semite or
from
claiming
as their intellectual forefathers a number of Christian thinkers such
as Luther
or,
in
Rosenberg's case,
the medieval
mystic
Meister Eckhart. What
is
more,
even if their break with
Christianity
were
complete
and their
proposed
ersatz
religion truly
uncontaminated
by
the
Bible,
Steigmann-Gall
notes that the
paganists
never
managed
to achieve
hegemony
within the
NSDAP.
Representing
Nazism as a secular
religion presupposes ascribing
to the
paganists
a kind of
weight
and
recognition
that
they
did not
possess,
aside from
glossing
over their
continuing allegiance
to elements of Christian
spirituality.
When,
a
year
after
publishing
The
Holy
Reich,
Steigmann-Gall
turned to
spell
out the
negative implications
of his revision of Nazi
conceptions
of
Christianity
for
representations
of Nazism as a
political religion,
the move
displayed
similarities with the Greek invasion of
Troy.
The
journal
Totalitarian Movements
and Political
Religion,
founded in 2000 and with
Burleigh,
Gentile,
and Griffin
among
its
past
and
present editors,
has served as the
preeminent
forum for all
major contemporary proponents
of the
political religion approach; Steigmann-
Gall was commissioned to insert his
opposition
in the
very capital:
the
special
issue on Nazism as a
political religion.
A considerable
portion
of his
essay
reiterated his
reading
of Nazism as a Protestant movement: "Far from
being
a
secularist movement
replacing Christianity
with a new
object
of
worship,
Nazism
sought
to defend German
society against
secularization."23 For
Steigmann-Gall,
Nazism was no
political
or secular
religion,
but rather
"religious politics,"
that
is,
politics
in
conformity
with Christian
(Protestant) precepts.
More
interesting
than this
repetition
of the
argument
from his
book, however,
is
Steigmann-Gall's
explanation
as to
why
so
many
historians have
mistakenly
taken to
representing
Nazism as a
political religion.
One reason he detects is the unwarranted
tendency
to treat
Rosenberg
and the
paganist wing
of the NSDAP as
representative
of the
overall Nazi worldview. The main
reason, however,
is the
optic
of
political religion
itself. As
Steigmann-Gall
understands this
optic,
it accords
disproportionate
attention to the form and function of Nazi
religious beliefs,
which obscures from
it the substance of these beliefs.
Steigmann-Gall's
model of
political religion
is based on his
survey
of the
political religion
literature on
Nazism,
including
works
by Burleigh,
Mosse,
and
Stem.
This
survey
leads him to assert that
"political religion theory emphasizes
Nazi form
(the hypnotic power
of a new charismatic
faith)
over Nazi content
(the message
of that
religion
and to whom it
appealed)."24
For
Steigmann-Gall,
the
political religion approach
to Nazism in
many ways
manifests the recent
culturalist turn in the human sciences. It was this
turn--the
expansion
of
history
to cultural
history,
the
broadening
of its
subject
matter
beyond
timeless texts to
encompass
various cultural
practices
and institutions - that has enabled the above-
named scholars to discover formal and functional identities between Nazism and
Christianity and, based on these identities, to
portray
Nazism as an ersatz
religion.
Yet
Steigmann-Gall's key point
is that the increased
sensitivity
to culture has
come at a cost: decreased
empiricism. Analyses
of Nazi aesthetics and ritual have
23.
Steigmann-Gall,
"Nazism and the Revival of Political
Religion Theory,"
376.
24. Ibid., 377.
382 MILAN BABIK
taken the advocates of the
political religion approach away
from the substance of
the
ideology.
In
Steigmann-Gall's
words,
"The
political religion
thesis
presumes
the attraction to Nazism was based on emotion instead of
idea,
on form instead of
content. Whatever the Nazi
'platform' may
have been is deemed
irrelevant,
or at
best
secondary.
The
'religion'
of
political religion theory [is]
the act of
believing,
not that which is believed."25
This
overly
functionalist definition of
religion
is
directly responsible
for the
misrepresentation
of Nazism as a
surrogate religion.
Had scholars such as
Burleigh
or Mosse
paid
more attention to the content of the
Nazi
ideology, they
would have found that the narrative of
progress
to the Third
Reich was not
merely structurally analogous
to Christian
(Protestant) eschatology,
but that it was Christian
eschatology. Steigmann-Gall rejects
the secular
religion
interpretation
of Nazism
precisely
because Nazism was identical to Protestantism
not
just formally
and
functionally,
but in content as well.
Is
Steigmann-Gall's representation
of Nazism as a Protestant movement
convincing,
and if
so,
does this warrant his
subsequent rejection
of Nazism as a
political
or secular
religion? Concerning
the first
question,
for all his revisionism
Steigmann-Gall
is rather
persuasive.
Whether or not his
Holy
Reich
dislodges
representations
of Nazism as
paganism,
it adds to them an
important
corrective.
For each
public
statement
distancing
Nazism from
religion,
Hitler made one
like the
following:
"Who
comprehends
National Socialism
merely
as a
political
movement knows almost
nothing
about it. It is more even than
religion:
it is the
will to a new creation of man."26 Hitler's relentless claims to
personify
"God,"
the "Lord
Almighty,"
or "Providence" are
well-documented.27
His
private
table
talk does
repeatedly
demonize
Christianity
as "the heaviest blow that ever struck
humanity,"28
but not without
salvaging
Jesus with the contention that "Christ was
an
Aryan."29 Depicting
Hitler as a consistent
paganist
is thus dubious because
his anticlericalism did not
necessarily
mean the absence of some
other, different,
highly
unorthodox Christian
spirituality (what Steigmann-Gall
calls
"positive
Christianity")
and also because Hitler was a virtuoso of self-contradiction. When
it comes to
Rosenberg, Steigmann-Gall's
detection of Christian elements in the
thought
of this
preeminent
Nazi
paganist
is
equally plausible-and
not even
so novel. Claus-Ekkehard
Birsch
had
already argued
in 1997 that
"although
Rosenberg rejects
Jewish-Christian
monotheism,
he is no
neo-pagan.'"30
Rosenberg's
reverence for Meister Eckhart was noted
above,
and the God whom
the medieval Dominican
mystic
immanentized in the
Aryan
soul was none other
than the Christian one. From Hitler and
Rosenberg
one could
proceed
to
Goebbels,
who had
contemplated turning
the NSDAP into a
church,
on one occasion
25.
Ibid.,
380.
26.
Quoted
in Manfred Ach and Clemens
Pentrop,
Hitlers
"Religion": Pseudoreligidse
Elemente
im nationalsozalistischen Sprachgebrauch (Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft fiir Religions-
und Weltan-
schauungsfragen, 1977), 48. The volume contains a collection of more than 200 of Hitler's utterances,
public
and
private, documenting
his
pseudo-Christianity.
27. See, for example, Domarus, ed., Hitler:
Speeches
and Proclamations, 1932-1945, I, 28-32.
28. Hitler's Table Talk, transl. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1953), 7, entry
no. 4
(July 11/12, 1941).
29. Ibid., 143, entry
no. 75 (December 13, 1941).
30. Claus-Ekkehard Biirsch, "Alfred
Rosenbergs Mythus
des 20. Jahrhunderts als
politische
Religion,"
in Maier and
Schiifer, eds., Totalitarismus and Politische Religionen, II, 236.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
383
expressed
the wish to be "an
apostle
and
preacher"31
of
the Nazi
idea,
and invested
his diaries with a
significant
amount of
religious language.
Overall,
there was
enough religion
in Nazi
self-presentation
to
prompt
worries in the Vatican that the
German faithful
might
consider Nazism an authentic Christian movement. The
1937
encyclical
Mit brennender
Sorge,
written
by Pope
Pius XI and
Secretary
of
State
Eugenio
Pacelli
(soon
to become Pius
XII),
issued the
following warning:
"Whoever does not wish to be a Christian
ought
at least to renounce the desire
to enrich the
vocabulary
of his unbelief with the
heritage
of Christian ideas."32
In veiled but unmistakable
terms,
the
castigation targeted especially
Hitler's
blasphemous
claims to know God's will and the
providential path
of
history
to
salvation,
which is to
say,
it was in
many respects
a
castigation
from Catholic
(Augustinian)
transcendentalists to a Protestant
(Joachite)
millennialist. This
tends further to corroborate
Steigmann-Gall's
thesis that
many
Nazis
imagined
their mission within the framework of
positive Christianity.
That this was not the
papal
definition of
Christianity
is a different matter.
If
Steigmann-Gall's
narrative of Protestant Nazism is
quite persuasive,
however,
his elaboration of its
implications
for
interpretations
of Nazism as a
secular or
political religion
seems to me much less successful.
Contrary
to his
critique
of
political religion theory
in the
special
issue of Totalitarian Movements
and Political
Religions,
I
suggest
that Protestant Nazism does not
necessarily
undermine Nazism as a secular
religion.
The two
optics
are not inconsistent.
This is
apparent already
from,
for
example, Birsch's reading
of
Rosenberg.
As I
indicated in the
preceding paragraph, Birsch broadly converges
with
Steigmann-
Gall in
arguing
that the
thought
of the
leading
Nazi
paganist
was in fact much
more Christian than is
commonly
assumed. In some
ways, Birsch's
revision of
Rosenberg
is even more radical than
Steigmann-Gall's;
the latter does not
go
so
far as to
deny Rosenberg's paganism.
Yet for
Barsch,
representing Rosenberg
as an
essentially
Protestant thinker
deeply
influenced
by
Meister Eckhart serves
to demonstrate
Rosenberg's political religion,
not to undermine it. For
Birsch,
Rosenberg's
racialist Protestantism forms the
very
backbone of his secular
religion;
this means that a
broadly
similar
description
of
Rosenberg
has
propelled
Birsch
to a
position exactly opposite
to the one reached
by Steigmann-Gall
with
regard
to the
validity
of the secular
religion approach
to Nazism.
This
discrepancy
serves as a convenient
point
of
departure
for the next
section,
which delves into secularization
theory
in order to
argue
that secularization does
not
necessarily presuppose
de-Christianization. In
fact,
if the
Lwith-Blumenberg
debate on secularization serves as
any
indication,
a
modem
progressivism (such
as
the Nazi
ideology
of the Third
Reich)
has the best chance of
assuring
itself the status
of secularized
eschatology
if it retains Protestant millennialism in its content.
III. THE LOWITH-BLUMENBERG DEBATE ON SECULARIZATION
"Secularization" is a
generic
term
encompassing
a wide
range
of
meanings,
such
as the
process
of
separation
of church and state, or the more
general process
31. Die
Tagebiucher
von
Joseph
Goebbels:
Stimtliche
Fragmente,
ed. Elke
Frohlich (Munich: Saur,
1987), I, 160, entry
dated February 11, 1926.
32. Quoted
in
Burleigh,
"Political Religion,"
17.
384 MILAN BABiK
of
abandoning dogma
and
religious
modes of
thinking
in favor of reason and
science. It is
consequently imperative
to be
precise
as to what the term
signifies
in this article. Secularization is a theoretical construct
employed by
social and
intellectual historians to understand better the
complex relationship
between
modern historical consciousness and Judeo-Christian or biblical historical
consciousness. I want to
investigate
in this section the
proposition
that modem
philosophy
of
history,
dominated
by categories
of
reason,
progress,
and ideal
society,
is a secularized version of Christian
eschatology,
dominated
by categories
of
faith,
divine
providence,
and heaven.
Variants of this
proposition
are not difficult to find in
twentieth-century
historical
and social
theory.
A number of eminent scholars had come to the conclusion that
modem
progressivism
somehow continued Christian salvationism.
Among
the
earliest was the Yale historian Carl
Becker,
who
suggested
that the
eighteenth-
century "philosophes
demolished the
Heavenly City
of St.
Augustine only
to
rebuild it with more
up-to-date materials,"33
and that "The
picture
of salvation in
the
Heavenly City
... [was
translated into an
image]
of a 'future state'. . . or a
more
generalized earthly
and social
filicitj
or
perfectibilito
du
genre
humain."34
For
Becker, modem
philosophy
dismissed the
otherworldly utopia
of
Christianity
as
religious superstition,
but not without
reinstating
it on
worldly
foundations:
as an
earthly paradise
achievable
through progress
in reason and science.
Becker's
contemporary,
Reinhold
Niebuhr,
professor
at Union
Theological
Seminary
in New
York,
also contended that modem
philosophy
of
history
rested
on
eschatological
foundations.
According
to
Niebuhr,
Christian
faith,
with its
emphasis
on historical time as
flowing
forward to a
significant future,
"has an
affinity
with the modem sense of
history.
It is indeed the soil out of which modem
historical consciousness
grew.""35
From Niebuhr one could
go
on to
Ernest
Lee
Tuveson,
who
diagnosed progress
as the transformation of the
great
millennialist
expectation
and
argued
that "It is not inaccurate to
speak
of
'progress'
as a
'faith,'
for it
signified
confidence in a new kind of Providence -the historical
process."36
The role of divine
providence
was transferred to natural
laws;
the
Augustinian
civitas Dei
metamorphosed
into social
utopia.
Lest it be
thought
that
theorizing progress
as Providence reincarnated was an
exclusively
American or
Anglophone phenomenon,
others
engaged
in the endeavor
included
Raymond
Aron and Nicolas
Berdyaev.
Aron resorted to secularization
theory
in
1939,
regarded
himself as the father of the term "secular
religion,""
and
had written several
essays utilizing
the
concept.38
He
spelled
out his definition of
it most
clearly
in the article "The Future of Secular
Religions," published
in La
33. Carl L.
Becker,
The
Heavenly City of
the
Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New
Haven: Yale
University Press, 1932), 31.
34. Ibid., 48-49.
35. Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and
History:
A
Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of
History (London: Nisbet, 1949), 42.
36. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and
Utopia:
A
Study
in the
Background of the Idea of
Progress [1949] (New York:
Harper
and Row, 1964), xi-xii.
37.
Brigitte Gess, "Die
Totalitarismuskonzeption
von
Raymond Aron und Hannah Arendt," in
Maier and
Schhifer, eds., Totalitarismus und
Politische Religionen, I, 264-265.
38.
Many
of them are collected under "Les
Religions S6culibres,"
in
Raymond Aron, Une histoire
du
vingtidme sidcle,
ed. Christian Bachelier
(n.p.: Plon, 1996), 139-222.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
385
France libre in 1944:
"I
propose
to call 'secular
religions'
the doctrines that in
the soul of our
contemporaries
take the
place
of a vanished faith and situate
...
humanity's
salvation ... in this
world,
in the distant
future,
in the form of a social
order that has to be created."39 As for
Berdyaev,
this
great
Russian
philosopher
and
theologian
asserted that "the ancient belief in the realization . .. of the
Kingdom
of
God,
the
reign
of
perfection,
truth and
justice
. .. becomes secularized in the
doctrine of
progress."40
The
modem
striving
to rationalize the Judeo-Christian
myth
of salvation into narratives of inevitable advancement struck
Berdyaev
as
perverse
and farcical.
This list of thinkers is
by
no
means-exhaustive.
Carl
Schmitt,
Jacob
Taubes,
and
Eric
Voegelin
are some of the most
significant
omissions. Rather than consider
so
many
different
figures,
however,
I want to focus on
only
one,
the German
philosopher
Karl L6with
(1897-1973),
whose
Meaning
in
History
I deem the
principal
statement of the secularization thesis. One reason that I constrain the
discussion in this manner is in order to avoid
constructing
a school of secularization
theorists where there
might
have been
none, although
a more extensive and nuanced
study
of the various
figures
would
likely
reveal a
significant degree
of shared
language
and ideas.41
Ultimately,
however, my
main reason for
giving
all attention
to L6with is that it is
primarily
to him that Hans
Blumenberg
addresses the
critique
of secularization
theory.
L6with is for
Blumenberg
the
key representative
of what
the latter
comprehends
under the rubric of secularization in the area of historical
theory: "[the]
thesis that
modem
historical consciousness is derived from the
secularization of the Christian idea of the 'salvation
story' [Heilsgeschichte] ..
."42
What
may
be called the
L6with-Blumenberg
debate is
certainly
not the
only
forum in which secularization has been
subjected
to critical
scrutiny.
It would be
possible
to choose a different avenue to
expose
and evaluate the
concept,
such
as Peter
Gay's general argument
that the
eschatological-utopian
elements of the
Enlightenment
have been
overemphasized-
an
argument
formulated in
part by
discussing
the claims made
by
Becker in the 1930s.43 Yet no other
exchange
on
the
subject
of secularization was
nearly
as
direct,
protracted,
and
philosophically
rigorous
as the one between L6with and
Blumenberg.
The first edition of L6with's
Meaning
in
History
came out in
1949,
the same
year
that saw the
appearance
of Tuveson's Millennium and
Utopia
and Niebuhr's
Faith in
History.44
Niebuhr
picked up
L6with's book
right away
and
gave
it a
39.
Aron,
"L'avenir des
religions
s6culibres,"
in Une histoire,
153.
40. Nicolas
Berdyaev,
The
Meaning of History,
transl.
George Reavey (London: Geoffrey Bles,
1936),
186. See also the excellent discussion of secularization that ensues on
pp.
187-192.
41. For instance,
Lowith's
Meaning
in
History,
discussed below as the main statement of the
secularization
thesis,
refers
repeatedly
to
Berdyaev's
above-mentioned
Meaning of History;
and
Tuveson's Millennium and
Utopia
cites with
approval
Becker's
Heavenly City.
42. Hans Blumenberg,
The
Legitimacy of
the Modern Age,
transl. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 27. Note that
Blumenberg's
definition corresponds
to the definition
speci-
fied at the outset of this section.
43. See Peter Gay, "Carl Becker's
Heavenly City,"
Political Science Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1957),
182-199; Gay,
The Science ofFreedom,
vol. 2 of The
Enlightenment:
An Interpretation [1969] (New
York: Norton, 1996); and
Gay,
The
Party of Humanity: Essays
in the French Enlightenment [1954]
(New York: Norton, 1959).
44.
Karl Lwith, Meaning
in History: The Theological Implications of
the
Philosophy of History
(Chicago: University
of
Chicago Press, 1949).
386 MILAN BABiK
stellar
review,
no doubt in
part
because L6with's
argument broadly converged
with his
own.45
L6with wrote the
study during
his American exile from Nazism
and
published
it
shortly
before his return to
Germany. Notably,
the subtitle of
this first
(American) edition,
"The
Theological Implications
of the
Philosophy
of
History,"
contained a
slight imprecision,
as became evident when the German
edition
appeared
a few
years
later. In the German
edition,
translated
by
Hanno
Kesting
under L6with's close
supervision,
the word
"implications"
was
replaced
with
"presuppositions" (Voraussetzungen).46
With this correction in
place,
the name of the volume became an accurate
summary
of L6with's thesis: that
modern
philosophy
of
history
is
impossible
without
specifically
Judeo-Christian
presuppositions
about the nature of the historical
process.
Is the
meaning
of
history
inherent in historical events
themselves,
and if
not,
where does it come from? This is the twofold
question motivating
L6with's
study.
His answer to the first
part
is in the tradition of classical
skepticism:
"Historical
processes
as such do not bear the least evidence of a
comprehensive
and ultimate
meaning.""47 They
are
essentially
chaotic,
a random
amalgamation
of events and
occurrences. If
they
did manifest
meaning,
after
all,
philosophers
would not
search for it. Yet L6with
emphasizes
that the absence of
any purely empirical
meaning,
while a
necessary precondition
for the
quest
for
meaning
to
begin,
is
not alone sufficient to initiate it. We
may
use Aristotle to illustrate this
point:
his view of
history
as an
unintelligible
collection of accidents did not
prompt
him to ask whether
they possessed any deeper significance. Rather,
he abandoned
history
as
uninteresting. Consequently,
what drives the search for the
meaning
of
history,
L6with
notes,
is
something
more than the mere
recognition
of
history
as chaos. It is the
perception
of the chaos as a
problem and,
most
fundamentally,
the
acquired
conviction that in the
background
there exists a
unifying principle
of order. In other
words,
the actual
meaninglessness
of
history
can arise
only
against
a
pre-established
horizon of
meaning:
the Judeo-Christian
eschaton,
salvation as the end of
history
in the twin sense of
finis
and telos. In L6with's
words,
"The claim that
history
has an ultimate
meaning implies
a final
purpose
or
goal transcending
the actual
events."48 His answer to the second
part
of his
question
thus
may
be summarized as follows: If
philosophy
of
history
refers to
"a
systematic interpretation
of universal
history
in accordance with a
principle by
which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate
meaning,"49
then "the
very
existence of a
philosophy
of
history
and its
quest
for a
meaning
is due to the
history
of
salvation;
it
emerged
from the faith in an ultimate
purpose."50
Modern
philosophies
of
progress
are rational and scientific
only
on the
45. See Reinhold
Niebuhr,
review of
Meaning
in
History, by
Karl
L6with,
Journal
of Religion
29
(1949),
302-303.
46. Karl
Liwith, Weltgeschichte
und
Heilsgeschehen:
Die
theologischen Voraussetzungen
der
Geschichtsphilosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953).
47.
Lwith, Meaning
in
History, 191; hereafter MH. For
example,
Aristotle viewed
history
as "a
single span
of
time-everything
that
happened...
in that
[period
of time], and each of these [events]
bearing
to the others an accidental [random] relation" (Poetics, transl.
George Whalley,
ed. John
Baxter and Patrick Atherton [Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997],
?33).
48. MH, 6.
49. Ibid., 1.
50. Ibid., 5. In Niebuhr's words, "Every larger
frame of
meaning,
which serves the observer of
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
387
surface. Under the surface
they rely
on
hope
and
expectation-precisely
because
their
vantage point
is located in the
future,
which is
empirically
unavailable."
The method of
Meaning
in
History
is
loosely genealogical.
L6with reads the
history
of ideas
backwards,
starting
from
nineteenth-century philosophies
of
history
and
tracing
the irrational element of futuristic
utopia
as far into the
past
as
possible--ultimately
to the biblical narrative of salvation. The
Bible,
occupying
the final
chapter
of
L6with's book,
is for him the silent
origin
of
modern
progressivism.
It is the Bible
that,
for the first
time,
unifies
temporal
events into
a coherent
story
of advancement
by interpreting
them from the
perspective
of
the
prophesied
moment of salvation as their
purpose
and conclusion. Ancient
Greeks and Romans knew
nothing
of last
days
and final
events,
of time as a finite
linear movement toward a climactic horizon. As L6with asserts with
regard
to
Herodotus's
History,
for
example,
"the
temporal
scheme of the narrative is not
a
meaningful
course of universal
history aiming
toward a future
goal, but,
like
all Greek
conception
of
time,
is
periodic, moving
within a
cycle."52 Polybius
or
Lucretius were no
exceptions.
The monumental
change
in the consciousness of
time,
from
cyclical
recurrence to
one-way (irreversible) time,
arrives
only
with
Judeo-Christian
religion
and in direct
consequence
of its salvationist
dogma.
According
to
L6with,
"the
living
toward a future eschaton ... is characteristic
only
for those who live
essentially by hope
and
expectation
-for Jews and
Christians,"
and in this vein "future and
Christianity
are indeed
synonymous."53
The
point
that
the Judeo-Christian
myth
of
redemption
in the Hereafter is
directly responsible
for
transforming
the
cyclical
consciousness of time into a
progressive
historical
consciousness,
and in this sense
represents
the latter's
origin,
has been made
by
several other
scholars, including
most
famously
Mircea Eliade.54
Preceding
the
chapter
on the Bible in
L6with's
book are
chapters
on Saint
Augustine
and his student Paulus Orosius. If the authors of the Bible laid out the
myth
of
salvation,
Augustine
and Orosius established its relevance to universal
history. Speculations
that biblical
concepts
were more than
strictly figurative,
that
is,
that
they possessed
historical
significance, predate Augustine
and
Orosius;
L6with
could
easily
have discussed Irenaeus of
Lyons
or Eusebius of Cesarea
instead. Yet as a
theologian
of
history, Augustine
towers
high
above
any
of
his
precursors, contemporaries,
and successors at least
up
to Thomas
Aquinas.
Augustine's
monumental
City of
God
(De
civitate Dei contra
paganos,
written
413-426)
set the
precedent
for all
subsequent
Christian historical
thinking.
In
L6with's
words,
"Augustine's City of
God is the
pattern
of
every
conceivable
historical events in
correlating
the events into some kind of
pattern,
is a structure of faith rather than
of science
..
."
(Faith
and
History, 135).
51. As L6with
put
it
elsewhere,
"We 'know' the future
only through
belief and
expectation" ("The
Quest for the Meaning of History,"
in Nature, History, and Existentialism, and Other
Essays
in the
Philosophy of History, ed. Arnold Levison [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966], 132).
52. MH, 7.
53. Ibid., 84.
54. See Mircea Eliade, The
Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and
History,
transl. Willard
R. Trask [1949] (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991), especially p. 104, where Eliade
argues
that "the Hebrews were the first to discover the
meaning
of
history
as the
epiphany
of God, and this
conception..,.
was taken
up
and
amplified by Christianity."
Cf.
Berdyaev, Meaning of History, 33-35;
and Niebuhr, Faith and
History, 22-23, 46.
388 MILAN BABIK
view of
history
that can
rightly
be called
'Christian."'55
In this
pattern
the biblical
civitas
Dei,
the
Kingdom
of God
prophesied
to come at the end of
time,
is shown
to be the
meaning
of
every temporal
event,
including
those that have
yet
to occur.
Notably, however,
Augustine
refrains from
predicting
when the
Kingdom
of God
will arrive
or,
for that
matter,
that it will arrive. In
Augustine's perspective
"the
City
of God is
not,"
L6with
stresses,
"an ideal which could become real in
history."56
Redemption
is for the
great
Father of the Latin Church almost
exclusively
a moral
and existential issue. Its
possibility
as a
historical
event is
severely
circumscribed.
Eschatology (the
biblical discourse about
salvation)
thus endows secular
history
with coherence and
meaning,
but the two do not intersect.
The crucial
figure
behind the
closing
of the
gap
between the biblical
story
of salvation and the
history
of the human
seculum
is for Lowith the medieval
Cistercian monk Joachim of Floris. In Joachim's
"theological historism,"
as L6with
refers to his
thought,
the Bible becomes a
roadmap
of
history
and
exegesis
becomes
cryptanalysis.
With the
proper key,
which Joachim
alleged
to have received
during
his
mystical
union with God at
Pentecost,
the
figurative categories
of the Bible can
be decoded to disclose the
providential path
of
history
to the millennium. Whereas
for
Augustine
the world moves toward salvation
only subjectively,
when
pondered
within the confines of the
religious soul,
for Joachim the movement is
objective,
taking place
in the material order of existence. Biblical
providence
is immanent
in the sceculum and unfolds as historical
progress.
In L6with's
words,
"The real
significance
of the sacraments is
not,
as with
Augustine,
the
signification
of a
transcendent
reality
but the indication of a
potentiality
which becomes realized within
the framework of
history.""57
The civitas Dei lies not
beyond history
for
Joachim,
but is nascent within
history,
which
accommodates
it and serves as a medium for
its disclosure. Those illuminated
by
the
Holy Spirit
can
glimpse
the course to the
millennium,
predict
the date of the
apocalypse,
and
intensify
their
preparation
for
the Last
Judgment.
For Joachim this
preparation
amounted to a
deeply spiritual
activity, consisting
of a
purifying
retreat from the world into monastic seclusion.
His
followers, however,
understood it in
opposite
terms: as
obeying
God's orders
to His elect
agents
on earth and
engaging
in radical transformative action. From
Franciscan
Spirituals
to Adamites in
early fifteenth-century
Bohemia
(Tdibor),
the
Middle
Ages
witnessed the
mushrooming
of numerous sects
practicing anarchy
and subversion in
expectation
of the Second
Coming.
Joachim thus oriented the transcendent
eschatology
of
Augustine
ad sceculum:
translated the
otherworldly
civitas Dei into an achievable ideal
society,
divine
providence
into human
progress,
and
religious
faith into
knowledge
of the future.
The mode of
religious expectation
underwent an
important change,
unintended
by Joachim,
from
pessimism
and withdrawal
owing
to the awareness that
history
cannot be
foreclosed, to
optimism
and revolution on behalf of the millennium.
In the form of Protestantism and Reformation, the latter
posture
became a
major
force
shaping
Western
modernity. L6with
thus referred to Joachim's unio
mystica
at
Pentecost, which
spurred
Joachim to formulate his historical
theology,
as "a
55. MH, 166.
56. Ibid. Cf. Niebuhr, Faith and
History, 37, 154.
57. MH, 151.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
389
decisive moment in the
history
of the
Church.""5
He was not alone in
recognizing
the monumental
impact
of Joachim's
thought.
Jiirgen
Moltmann,
frequently
regarded
as the world's
premier contemporary
Protestant
theologian,
stated that
"ever
since the Middle
Ages,
there is
hardly anyone
who has influenced
European
movements for
liberty
in
church,
state and culture more
profoundly
than this
twelfth-century
Cistercian abbot from
Calabria."59 For
a number of
political
religion
theorists,
Joachim's assimilation of
eschatology
with
history,
a
process
that
may
be described either as secularization of the sacred
myth
of salvation or as
sacralization of secular
affairs,
represents,
next to the
Bible,
the second
principal
origin
of
modern
salvationisms such as Nazism and
Bolshevism.60
Prior to
Joachim,
L6with discusses a number of other
great European
thinkers,
each more recent as we move toward the
beginning
of the book:
Bossuet, Vico,
Voltaire,
the French
positivists (including Comte), Hegel,
and Marx.
However,
it is not
necessary
to discuss each of them in detail here. The
point
that L6with
demonstrates time and
again
remains the same: that the various
philosophies
of
history
rest on
authentically
Christian
assumptions
about the nature of the historical
process.
The
only
difference is the extent of these
assumptions.
Some of the
figures presuppose
not
only
that
history
is
progress
to an ideal
future,
but also that
this ideal future is the
Kingdom
of God on earth and the
progressive
movement is
divine
providence.
These
openly
Christian thinkers include Bossuet but also
Hegel,
who
regarded
world
history
as the
progress
of
Spirit, Spirit
as the Divine
Idea,
and
his own
philosophy
as "the true
Theodictea,
the
justification
of God in
History."61
Others retained
only
the first
assumption, history
as
progress,
and
rejected
the rest.
Their
philosophies
of
history
are Christian
only structurally
and
hermeneutically;
the conscious
message
is non-Christian or anti-Christian. Marx
epitomizes
this
latter
group
of thinkers. His commitment to
utopia
and
history
as a
teleological
process
is
patent,
but the
process
as well as the telos are
expressly irreligious:
a
materialist dialectic
culminating
in a universal
community
of atheists. Insofar as
all the
philosophies
of
history
are contaminated
by
Christian
eschatology
to some
degree,
however,
L6with concludes that
"philosophy
of
history originates
with the
Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfillment and ... ends with the secularization of
58.
Ibid.,
146.
59.
Jiirgen Moltmann,
The
Trinity
and the
Kingdom (San
Francisco:
Harper
and
Row, 1981),
203.
60.
See,
for
example, Niebuhr,
Faith and
History, 2;
Eric
Voegelin,
"Ersatz
Religion:
The Gnostic
Mass Movements of Our
Time,"
in
Science,
Politics and Gnosticism: Two
Essays (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1968), 92-99;
and Norman
Cohn,
Pursuit
of
the Millennium:
Revolutionary
Millenarians
and
Mystical
Anarchists
of
the Middle
Ages (London: Paladin, 1970),
13 and 287-288. L6with was
explicit
that "it was the
attempt
of Joachim and the influence of Joachism which
opened
the
way
to
these future
perversions," by
which he meant
specifically
the Nazi and Bolshevik movements
(MH,
159).
61.
Georg
W. F.
Hegel,
The
Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree [1900] (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1991), 457. In Ldwith's words, Hegel "translate[s] the
eyes
of faith into the
eyes
of reason and the
theology
of
history
as established by Augustine
into a
philosophy
of
history
which
is neither sacred nor
profane.
It is a curious mix of both, degrading
sacred
history
to the level of secu-
lar
history
and
exalting
the latter to the level of the first" (MH, 59). Hegel thus in
principle repeats
the move
performed by
Joachim six centuries earlier: he
merges eschatology
with
temporal history.
For a detailed analysis of
Hegel's
secular
theology
of
history,
see Ldwith, "Hegel
and the Christian
Religion,"
in Nature, History, and Existentialism.
390 MILAN BABIK
its
eschatological pattern."62
Whether the secularization is
partial
or
total,
whether
it
merely
immanentizes the civitas Dei in
history (Joachim, Hegel)
or
goes
further
and also de-Christianizes
eschatology, replacing
the civitas Dei with an
irreligious
utopia (Voltaire, Marx),
is of
secondary importance.
Be it Christian
overtly
or
covertly,
"Western historical consciousness is
eschatological
from Isaiah to
Marx,
from
Augustine
to
Hegel,
from Joachim to
Schelling."63
L6with's book
quickly
achieved
widespread recognition, enough
of it to
prompt
worries that secularization was
becoming
the new
orthodoxy
about the
origins
of
Western
modernity.
The
popularity
of L6with's thesis was at least
partially
due to
the
timing
of its
publication.
The
complex yet lucidly
written
study
culminated
two decades of
theorizing
over the course of which
leading
intellectuals such as
the
already-mentioned Becker,
Berdyaev, Niebuhr,
and Aron addressed the same
subject
with similar
thoughts
as
they sought
to
explicate
the
origins
of
popular
support
for the Nazi and Bolshevik
utopias.
As a result of all these
efforts,
by
the
late 1950s the notion that the
Enlightenment
was in
many respects
a
ruse,
and that
modern rationalism
merely
secularized medieval Christian
theology,
had become
almost matter-of-fact. Reinhart Koselleck
appealed
to this common notion when
he
proclaimed
that "We know the
process
of
secularization,
which
transposed
eschatology
into a
history
of
progress."T'
Not
everybody
was as
uncritical,
however. The
opposition
was
spearheaded by
Hans
Blumenberg (1920-1996),
whose attack on secularization
theory
remains unmatched in terms of both its
breadth and
depth.
Blumenberg
is one of the
heavyweights
of
twentieth-century
continental social
and historical
theory;
he has been described as an author whose "works
...
are
comparable,
for both
pathbreaking originality
and
widely recognized importance,
only
to the works of
Jiirgen
Habermas."65 His initial
challenge
to L6with's thesis
took
place
at the Seventh German
Philosophy Congress
held in 1962 under the
theme
"Progress,"
where
Blumenberg rejected
secularization as an
adequate
account of the
genesis
of the modern idea of
progress
and
proposed
a different
narrative.
By
1966 he had
expanded
his
presentation
into a
full-fledged study
of
the
origins
of Western
modernity
in
toto,
no
longer restricting
himself
only
to the
subject
of
progress,
and he
published
the
study
under the title The
Legitimacy of
the
Modern
Age.' Scrupulously
researched,
highly imaginative,
and both much less
lucid and four times
longer
than L6with's
Meaning
in
History, Blumenberg's
book
was
heavily
reviewed
by leading philosophers
and on one
occasion--incidentally
in the
pages
of this
journal--described
as "a death blow to the
[secularization]
62.
MH,
2.
63.
L6with, "Nature,
History,
and
Existentialism,"
in
Nature,
History,
and
Existentialism,
23. A
useful
summary
of
L6iwith's overall
argument
is W.
Emmerich,
"Heilsgeschehen
und Geschichte-
nach Karl
L6with,"
Sinn und Form 46, no. 6 (1994), 894-915.
64. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique
and Crisis:
Enlightenment and the
Pathogenesis of Modern
Society [1959] (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 10-11. "In the course of
unfolding
the Cartesian
cogito ergo sum as the
self-guarantee of a man who has
dropped
out of the
religious bonds," Koselleck
continued, "eschatology
recoils into
Utopianism" (ibid.).
65. Robert M. Wallace, "Introduction to
Blumenberg,"
New German
Critique
32 (1984), 93.
66. Hans
Blumenberg,
Die
Legitimitiit
der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1966).
Between 1973 and 1976
Blumenberg expanded
and reworked the
study
further. The edition used here
(note 42) is the
only English translation of the second and definitive German edition.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
391
thesis
....67
What is
Blumenberg's critique
of the secularization thesis? The
rest of this section focuses on the theoretical model with which
Blumenberg
evaluates secularization as a tool of historical
understanding--a
model from
whose
perspective,
as will become
clear,
Steigmann-Gall's
Protestant Nazism
would
appear
to be a
particularly strong
instance of secular
religion.
Blumenberg's study
consists of four
parts;
it is in the
opening
one,
"Seculari-
zation:
Critique
of a
Category
of Historical
Wrong,"
that he mounts his
challenge
to secularization
theory.
The
preliminary
tasks include
specifying
the
meaning
of the secularization thesis in historical
theory
and
recognizing
Lowith as its
principal proponent.
The
ensuing critique
consists of three criteria with which
Blumenberg
sets out to test the
validity
of the secularization thesis:
"identifiability"
(of
the content of
modern
historical consciousness with the
original Christian),
"authentic
ownership" (of
the
original
content
by Christianity),
and "unilateral
removal"
(of
the
original
Christian content
by
an
agent
outside
it).68
A book-
length study
would have to scrutinize each in
turn,
but in this article I consider
only
the first
one,
since this criterion is
key
both in terms of
Blumenberg's
emphasis
and of
Lrwith's
subsequent response: identifiability
as the criterion
concerning
the
logic
of
continuity
between Christian
eschatology
and modern
progressivism.69 Blumenberg's thinking
behind the criterion is as follows: unless
Christian
eschatology
and
modern progressivism
share an identifiable substance
of
ideas,
where Christian
eschatology represents
its
original
form and
modern
progress
its new or secularized
form,
the
secularization
thesis fails
precisely
because there is
nothing
to have been secularized -no identifiable
body
of
thought
to have
undergone
the
alleged
transformation from the Christian
epoch
to the
modern
one. In such
circumstances, modern
philosophy
of
history may
resemble
biblical
eschatology,
but resemblance is where their
relationship
ends. There is no
substantive
bridge
across the
epochal
divide and hence no
genealogical
connection
between the two forms of
thought.
To show that
exactly
this is the
case,
Blumenberg argues
that the ideas
surrounding
modern
progress
are
diametrically divergent
from those associated with biblical
eschatology.
One
example
is the nature of the end of
history:
"It is ... a manifest
difference,"
according
to
Blumenberg,
"that an
eschatology speaks
of an event
breaking
into
history,
an event that transcends and is
heterogeneous
to
it,
while
the idea of
progress extrapolates
from a structure
present
in
every
moment to a
future that is immanent in
history."70
Whereas in Christian
theologies
of
history
the world terminates with a miraculous incursion from outside the
temporal
sequence,
modern
philosophies
of
history
cast the consummation as inherent in
67. Martin
Jay,
review of The
Legitimacy of
the Modern
Age, by
Hans
Blumenberg, History
and
Theory
24
(1985),
192.
68.
Blumenberg, Legitimacy of
the Modern Age,
24.
69. In an
essay summarizing
the issues at stake between L6with and
Blumenberg,
Robert Wallace
similarly
evaluated the first criterion as "central to
Blumenberg's critique
of L6with" and
gave
it
exclusive attention. See Wallace, "Progress,
Secularization and
Modernity:
The
Lowith-Blumenberg
Debate," New German Critique
22 (1981), 69. Lowith
recognized
"the
identity
of
expropriated
and
alienated substance in its historical
metamorphoses
... [as] the first and most
important
criterion for
the
legitimacy
of
any
talk about secularization.. ." (Liiwith, review of Die
Legitimitiit
der Neuzeit,
by
Hans
Blumenberg, Philosophische Rundschau 15 [1968], 196.)
70.
Blumenberg, Legitimacy of
the Modern
Age,
30.
392 MILAN BABIK
the world and achievable from within.
Moreover,
the differences do not end
here,
in the definition of the eschaton as transcendent and
beyond
time in the one case
and immanent and within time in the other. The
postures
toward the eschaton also
diverge. Progress, Blumenberg contends,
signifies "hopes
for the
greater security
of man in the
world,"
while
"eschatology
...
was more
nearly
an
aggregate
of
terror and dread."" Whereas Christian believers
pondered
the last
things
and final
events
trembling
with
fear,
the founders of the modem
age
looked to the future
with a measure of confidence
stemming
from the
practical improvements
that
could be achieved
through
reason and science. Taken
together,
these
disparities
lead
Blumenberg
to conclude that the Christian and
modern epochs
do not share
a common substance of ideas about
history
and
that,
consequently, progressivism
cannot be secularized
providentialism: "Regarding
the
dependence
of the idea
of
progress
on Christian
eschatology,
there are differences that . . . block
any
transposition
of the one into the
other."72
Instead of
secularization,
Blumenberg proposes
to
conceptualize
the transition
from Christian
providentialism
to
modern progressivism
as
something
else:
"functional
reoccupation,"
a term
denoting
his alternative account of the
process.
As the term
already
hints,
this account rests on a
particular theory
of
knowledge,
in which
Blumenberg distinguishes
functional
knowledge (variously
termed as
"functions,"
"questions,"
or "answer
positions")
from substantive
knowledge
("substance," "content," "answers").
Christian
eschatology
was an
aggregate
of
both. Functional
knowledge
was
present
in the form of the
question
"what is the
meaning
of
history?,"
and the
space
or answer
position
created
by
this
question
was
occupied
with the
corresponding
content or answer: the civitas Dei. In other
words,
functional
knowledge
was
present
as the
presupposition
that
history
had
an
end,
and substantive
knowledge
as the idea that this end was the civitas Dei.
Blumenberg's
central
point
in his revision of the transition from Christian to
modem historical consciousness is then as follows: "What ... occurred in the
process
that is
interpreted
as secularization . . . should be described not as the
transposition
of
authentically theological
contents into secularized alienation
from their
origin
but rather as the
reoccupation
of answer
positions
that had
become vacant . .
."73
Modem
philosophy successfully rejected
the substantive
idea that the civitas Dei was the end of
history,
but not the less obvious functional
idea that
history
had an end to
begin
with. The belief in the transcendent civitas
Dei fell victim to critical
reason,
but the belief in an eschaton
(as
a structural
feature of historical
narratives) escaped unharmed.
It remained vacant in
place
and was
swiftly reoccupied
with a new answer: immanent social
utopia
as the
content of modem
philosophies
of
progress.
In this
vein,
for
Blumenberg
"The
continuity
of
history
across the
epochal
threshold lies not in the
permanence
of...
substances," but rather in "a functional
reoccupation [of vacant answer
positions]
that creates the
appearance
of a substantial
identity lasting through
the
process
of secularization."74
L6with
let himself be deceived
by
this
appearance,
but
71. Ibid., 31.
72. Ibid., 30.
73. Ibid., 65.
74. Ibid., 48, 60, 89.
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
393
Blumenberg
is more
clear-sighted.
"The
identity upon
which the secularization
thesis
rests,"
he
declares,
"is not one of contents but one of
functions,"75
and since
it is the
identity
of
theological
contents that needs to be demonstrated for the
secularization thesis to
work,
the thesis fails.
Does
Blumenberg's critique
of Lowith succeed? Two
separate points
need
to be made in
response
to this
question.
The first concerns
Blumenberg's theory
of historical
knowledge,
more
specifically
his distinction between function and
substance,
and the second relates to his
reading
of Christian
eschatology.
Both
suggest
that
Blumenberg ultimately
failed to discredit L6with's thesis.
The
problem
with
Blumenberg's theory
of historical
knowledge
is that the
dichotomy
of function
(question,
answer
position)
and substance
(content, answer)
may
be a false one. This is because functions
implicitly
communicate substantive
ideas. In other
words,
it is
possible
to show that
theological questions
about
history
are
simultaneously theological
answers to
yet
more fundamental
questions
about
history.
The
question,
what is the
meaning
of
history,
offers an excellent
example.
It not
only
asks
something,
but
simultaneously
claims that
history
has
meaning,
which is a
specifically
Christian answer to the still more basic and ulterior
question concerning
what,
if
anything,
is worth
knowing
about
history
to
begin
with. Christian
theology
in this sense
taught
the believer two substantive
ideas,
neither of which existed in Greece. One was that the civitas Dei was the end of
history,
and the
other,
concealed in the
first,
was that
history
had an end in the first
instance: eschaton as the future moment of salvation. It is
principally
the latter
(structural)
idea that L6with
argues
has survived into the modern
era,
not so much
the former one. He does not contend that the transcendental civitas Dei made it
across the
epochal
break,
only
that the eschaton did: the habit of
comprehending
history
in terms of an
eschatological
narrative structure. Whether the salvation be
transcendent or
immanent,
both the Christian and modern historical consciousness
are
eschatological
and future-oriented. "The essential
commonality,"
Lbwith wrote
in his
reply
to
Blumenberg,
"is that both live
by hope
insofar as
they
conceive of
history
as
proceeding
toward final fulfillment
[erfiillendes
Ziel]
which lies in the
future."76 To the extent that
Blumenberg grants
this
continuity
too,
his functional
reoccupation
model indeed
converges
with
Lrwith's
secularization model.77 If, as
I
suggest,
functions communicate hidden
content,
and
if,
as
Blumenberg
admits,
theological
functions survive into the modern
age (where they
are
reoccupied),
there exists a substantive connection between the two
epochs.
A more holistic
theory
of
knowledge,
where the
dichotomy
of function and substance is
abolished,
turns
reoccupation
of
theological
functions into secularization of
theological
substance.
75. Ibid., 64.
76. Liiwith, review of Die
Legitimitiit
der Neuzeit, 199.
77. Robert
Pippin
found it difficult to
distinguish
between them:
"Blumenberg agrees
with a
good
deal of what
Lrwith... claim[s]. For all his criticism, he
agrees
that the
modern
view of
progress..,.
is
a remnant of sorts of the
premodern
tradition
....
A reader
might
wonder what could
possibly
be at stake
in
'secularization'
versus
're-occupation' models...
if so much of the
territory modernity 're-occupies'
is, it is admitted, not its own."
("Blumenberg
and the
Modernity Problem," Review
of Metaphysics
40
[1987], 541-542).
394
MILAN BABIK
It is not
necessary
to
challenge Blumenberg's theory
of historical
knowledge,
however,
in order to
suggest
that his
critique
of
L6with
falters. Even if one
grants
the
dichotomy
of function and
substance,
there is a
separate
area of weakness
in
Blumenberg's argument:
his
portrayal
of Christian
eschatology. Blumenberg
manages
to demonstrate the lack of
any
substantive
continuity
between Christian
eschatology
and modem
progressivism only
because he
represents eschatology
as
exclusively
transcendental
(Augustinian);
in so
doing
he
ignores
its
separate
historical branch. Not a
single
mention is made
throughout
The
Legitimacy of
the
Modern
Age
of
Joachim--an
omission too
conspicuous
to
go
unnoticed in the
extensively
researched volume. The reason for the exclusion is that in Joachim's
theological
historism,
and in Protestant millennialism for which Joachim
prepared
the
ground,
salvation is held to be nascent within the
world,
and it invites
optimistic
preparations by
those in
possession
of God's
guiding grace. Including
Joachim in
his
study
would thus force
Blumenberg
to confront the
unhappy recognition
that,
as Eric
Voegelin
noted in one of his letters to Leo
Strauss,
immanentization of the
otherworldly
civitas Dei in
many respects begins already
in the Middle
Ages:
within
Christian
eschatology
itself and well before the onset of the modem
age.78
While
Blumenberg may
be correct that there is no common substance of ideas between
Augustinian eschatology
and modem
progressivism,
a discussion of Joachite and
Protestant
eschatology
would
yield
the
opposite
conclusion. "The millenarianism
associated with
figures
like Joachim of
Fiore,
a
figure strangely ignored by
Blumenberg,"
Martin
Jay
commented,
"may
still be accounted a substantialist
rather than
merely
functionalist link with secular
utopias
of the modem
age."79
Even
on
Blumenberg's
terms, then,
without
any challenge
to his
theory
of
knowledge
or criteria of
assessment,
the secularization thesis
survives--precisely
within the
tradition of historical
speculation
that he chooses to leave
out."
IV. CONCLUSION: PROTESTANT NAZISM IN LIGHT OF
THE SECULARIZATION DEBATE
The result of the
lengthy analysis
of the
L6with-Blumenberg
debate on
secularization
may
be
expressed
as the
following
conditional:
any given
modem
ideology
of
progress
is most
legitimately
described as a secularized
eschatology
if
its content is identical with Protestant millennialism.
Steigmann-Gall's
revisionist
representation
of Nazism
turns
out to be
just
the antecedent of this conditional: the
content of the Nazi narrative of
progress
to the Third
Reich,
recall that
Steigmann-
Gall has
argued,
was Protestant millennialism. Thus
by
modus
ponens,
Protestant
Nazism constitutes an eminent
example
of secularized or
political eschatology.
78. Faith and Political
Philosophy:
The Correspondence
between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin,
1934-1964, transl.
and ed. Peter
Emberley
and
Barry Cooper (Columbia: University
of Missouri
Press, 2004), 73.
79.
Jay,
review of The
Legitimacy of
the Modern
Age, 192.
80. Laurence
Dickey
concluded
similarly
that unless
Blumenberg "discuss[es] the role Protestantism,
in its liberal
accommodationist mode, played
in the
emergence
of the
'modern'
idea of
gradual...
progress
in
history
..., [he cannot]
hope..,.
to
lay
the secularization thesis to
rest..
."
("Blumenberg
and Secularization: 'Self-Assertion' and the Problem of
Self-Realizing Teleology
of History,"
New
German Critique
41
[1987], 165).
NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION
395
That
Steigmann-Gall
has reached
exactly
the
opposite
result,
rejecting
the
framing
of Nazism as a
political religion
on the
grounds
that Nazism was
consciously
Protestant,
derives from the fact that his model of
political religion
is uninformed
by
the
L6with-Blumenberg
debate.
To the extent that
Steigmann-Gall
extracts his model from a
survey
of
political
religion historiography
on
Nazism,
a
larger problem
manifests itself: a
disjunction
between historians who utilize
political religion
in their
representations
of
Nazism,
on the one
hand,
and historical and social theorists who have formulated
the
concept,
on the
other.81
If the
journal
Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions represents
the
flagship
of
contemporary political religion historiography,
references to L6with or
Blumenberg
are
puzzlingly
absent. This is not to
say
that
political religion
historians
neglect
theoretical issues
completely;
in
particular,
the
philosophy
of Eric
Voegelin,
L6with's
contemporary
and
acquaintance
in American
exile,
has received
repeated
attention. Nor
again
is it to insist that
political religion
historiography
should become
thoroughly philosophical;
a certain
gap
between
history
and
theory
is inevitable and warranted
by
other benefits from the division
of intellectual labor.
Rather,
what I
suggest
is that at
present
the
gap
is too wide -
especially given
that
political religion historiography may gain significantly
from
becoming
more theoretical.
What are some of these
potential gains?
One is that
political religion
historiography
would no
longer
need to eschew
overtly religious
movements
and
regimes
or,
as in the case of Protestant
Nazism,
to
rely
on
discounting
their
content as a mere
faqade
for other
purposes.
Political
religion
historians could
expand
their
subject
matter from ersatz
(non-
or
anti-Christian) eschatologies
to
Christian
progressivisms.
Indeed,
from the
perspective
of
Blumenberg's critique
of
secularization,
philosophies
of
progress
whose content is identifiable with
Christian salvationism are the
only legitimate
candidates for the label of secularized
eschatology,
and to this extent
they
should
represent
the
point
of
departure
for
political religion
historians,
not the site of their
neglect.
For
example,
the
nineteenth-century
American
conception
of
progress
and
expansion
as Manifest
Destiny,
a
conception heavily
invested with the
language
and ideas of Protestant
millennialism,
would seem to offer excellent material for
investigation.
Including
Christian
progressivisms
in the
category
of secular
religion
would
not be
unproblematic: religious
narratives of
progress (such
as Protestant
Nazism)
and
irreligious
ones
(such as,
most
prominently,
Bolshevik
Communism)
would
81. This
argument
should not be
pressed excessively, owing
to the fact that
Steigmann-Gall's
survey
of the secular
religion
literature on Nazism is rather selective. It is
incomplete
at best and a
caricature at worst. While works
by Burleigh, Gentile, Mosse,
or Stern
tend to
give
credence to his
claim that the
optic
of secular
religion privileges
function over substance, there are other historians
whose
framing
of Nazism as a secular
religion
stands on an
analysis
of substantive ideas, not
merely
of ritual and aesthetic forms. Claus-Ekkehard Birsch is an excellent
example:
his
representation
of
Nazism as a
political religion pays almost no
regard
to the movement's ceremonial and
symbolic
aspects
and is based
nearly exclusively
on texts. See Biirsch, "Alfred
Rosenbergs Mythus,"
and also
Biirsch, Die
politische Religion
des
Nationalsozialismus:
die
religiise
Dimension der NS-Ideologie
in den Schriften von Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg und
Adolf
Hitler (Munich:
Fink, 1998). Noticing
these historians would
likely prompt Steigmann-Gall
to revise his understand-
ing
of
political religion
from a functionalist model to a more content-oriented one, and this model
would in turn reveal a
surprising capacity
to accommodate his account of Protestant Nazism.
396 MILAN BABIK
now find themselves side
by
side under the same
heading.
Yet a solution to this
problem
is not as difficult to find as it
may
seem.
Indeed,
it was
already
hinted
at above. Instead of secularization
plain
and
simple,
it
may
be more
appropriate
to break the
category
down into a
pair
of more discrete
sub-categories: partial
or
first-degree
secularization,
and
complete
or
second-degree
secularization. The
former would
encompass
those modem
philosophies
of
progress
that continue the
Christian
conception
of
history
in their form and function as well
as, still,
in their
conscious content. In other
words,
it would
encompass religious progressivisms
that secularize the biblical
story
of salvation
only
in the limited sense of imma-
nentizing
the transcendent
(Augustinian)
civitas Dei within the historical world
as a
goal
of
moral,
political,
and
technological striving.
The latter
sub-category,
complete
secularization,
would then refer to
progressivisms
that
allege
to have
abandoned the Bible and no
longer consciously
retain
any religious
content. The
Christian idea of
history
remains
present
in these
only
in the subterranean and
hermeneutical
sense,
that
is,
only
in their structural and functional
aspects,
while
their surface
message
is non- or anti-Christian. Such
philosophies
of
progress
not
only
immanentize the
otherworldly
civitas
Dei,
but in addition sever it from its
biblical
origin
and
present
the end of
history
as a scientific
utopia
that is unrelated
to
religion
or
indeed,
as in
Marxism,
presupposes
the
disappearance
of
religion.
Fine-tuning
secularization as a tool of historical
understanding
in this manner
represents
a
second,
and
perhaps
the
key, potential
benefit for
political religion
historiography.
With the distinction between
partial
and
complete
secularization
in
place,
there is
every
reason to believe that one can
classify Steigmann-Gall's
Protestant Nazism as secularized
eschatology
while
remaining
sensitive to its dif-
ferences from other
(irreligious)
instances of the same
phenomenon.
St.
Antony's College,
Oxford